People have at all times been fascinated with the query of human longevity. In this 1954 piece for Technology Review, James A. Tobey, writer of greater than a dozen books on public well being, together with Your Diet for Longer Life (1948), famous that regardless of a couple of frauds claiming to be older than 150, “the consensus of scientific opinion is that there is a definite limit to human life, a limit now and perhaps forever in the vicinity of 100 years.”
In 1954, the typical life expectancy of an American at start had risen to 68 years from 47 in 1900. But many of the advances got here not from previous folks dwelling longer however from infants avoiding dying earlier than their first birthday. The common individual’s possibilities of dwelling to 100 in mid-Twentieth-century America, Tobey noticed, had been “no better than they were in the days of the Roman Empire.”
We have performed higher since then: common life expectancy reached practically 79 years within the US earlier than declining lately, largely on account of the covid-19 pandemic. But as this concern of TR reveals, the hunt to maintain extending the higher restrict on our years lives on.